Exploring the Primitive: METABOX

‘An image is something that recalls something in one’s mind, and an artist’s work is a deed of broadening the convention of creating images.’ As an architect who creates spatial images, I gave a lot of thought to the aforementioned remark by artist Suh Yongsun. His work is replete with explorations on how to translate the three-dimensional space of reality into a two-dimensional canvas. It captures things that cannot be expressed through realism or perspective without fully abstracting or conceptualising them, allowing the actual subject to be recognised. For instance, the grid lines that appear frequently in paintings of urban and interior spaces seem to establish a perspective-drawing-like spatial perception, but they do not get to reproduce the actual space. The familiar spatial perception in Suh’s work, as well as questions and ideas about images derived from his paintings, became the architectural orientation for this building. Lines and masses of vibrant primary colour play crucial roles in conveying a sort of primitive mood in his work. In particular, the red colour separates and connects the subject and the blank space; it seems realistic yet simultaneously abstract, and symbolic while psychological. With this thinking in mind, I searched for the methods of erecting the building or the point at which it can become an architectural experience. The building is positioned such that it may be seen by many people on the roadside of the village’s entry. When viewed from the front, the building seems to be a floating cube drawn in a plane. The rigorous grid pattern of the mould, holes of the lattice windows that seem to have no depth of the joints, and the red colour painted in details such as every window and railing transform the three-dimensional structure into a two-dimensional image. The regularly spaced windows on the rear side serve as frames for the surrounding scenery to be seen from the interior space, as well as modules for hanging the exhibited paintings. When gazing inside or around the building, one realises that the depth of the building is very thin, shattering the imagery of a cubic seen from the front side and disrupting the familiar spatial perception. / written by Jeong Euiyeob​